The Ghost Shift

by John Gapper

  He nodded several times. “This is a good way to work, isn’t it? With love for others. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Very good,” Mei said firmly, and the others joined in, murmuring the word obediently.

  “Respect.” The instructor was now on a roll. “We respect each other. Cao trusts you to join his workplace. Weaklings are turned away. Everyone in this room already has our respect. You will be paid very well, you will eat good food. There are many things on our campus. Feel free, we want you to enjoy them. But treat our instructions with respect. We know what is best for you.”

  “We are honored.” This time, the student next to Mei was the fastest to respond, earning a nod from the instructor.

  “Discipline. Cao was taught discipline by his loving parents. Without discipline, he could not have created this company. He would not be a billionaire and own a private jet. He could not show his love by building a mansion for his mother. He was hungry, but he never wavered. You will have a far easier time than Cao Fu did. Ten hours a day? No! He worked fourteen. Six days a week? No, seven days! He wasn’t paid for overtime work. He wasn’t pampered.”

  The whole class murmured approvingly before anyone could grab the lead, and the instructor beamed. Mei nodded, smiling the way that Pan did, to lend her own authority to others.

  “Now, to show you respect, we will have a break. Stretch your legs! Enjoy our tea, made with our own Long Tan leaves, prepared especially for us. Welcome to our happy family.”

  Outside, the ground was wet with rain from an earlier shower and it steamed in the sunshine. The girl who’d messed up her reply to the instructor smiled shyly at her as she sipped tea.

  “He was friendly. I’ve heard stories about how unhappy people are here. But I feel better now. I am Han Jun. What is your name?”

  “Jiang Jia,” Mei said. She envied the girl for being so easily pleased by a free cup of tea. She’d been as trusting herself not long ago, but that innocence had been snatched from her, leaving distrust and doubt.

  “I’m from Guizhou,” Jun said. “I came to Guangdong to study but I need to earn money. The courses are very expensive.”

  When they were called back, the instructor was grinning as if he couldn’t believe their luck.

  “I have exciting news. Our plan for the day has changed. We usually spend time practicing the tasks you must master. But we are so busy, we have so much to do, that you will go to your new positions to allow you to learn faster. It is an amazing privilege. Our finest workers will teach you. I will take two of you, and supervisors will escort the others.”

  He consulted a list. “Jiang Jia and Han Jun. Come with me.”

  A golf cart waited outside, and the instructor turned to address them as it bumped up the avenue.

  “This is a special day, and you are luckiest of all. Guess which line you have been chosen to join?”

  Looking at his glowing face, Mei wondered if he could be as much of an idiot as he appeared. Had he been brainwashed into this state of euphoria at everything that Long Tan did, or was he a fraud?

  “Might it be Poppy?” She was able to slip into the voice of Jia easily—that naive wonder was how she’d felt on her first morning in Guangzhou when she had arrived in the city from Guilin, forever ago.

  “Yes!” He slapped the seat delightedly. “You are so lucky, girls. You will build these magical devices.”

  The plant was in the newest part of the complex, a fifteen-minute drive away. From a distance, it looked like a hangar by the side of a runway—a white structure with an arched roof, punctuated by a line of windows about a hundred feet in the air. The walls below were solid, offering no clue as to what was happening inside. To penetrate it, Mei, Jun, and the instructor had to pass through two sets of electronic doors, separated by a hallway. The second door opened with a pop, as if the vacuum inside had been punctured.

  In the changing rooms, a woman supervisor gave them each a set of slip-on rubber shoes, white overalls, and cotton caps. She mimed how to fold their hair under the cap, and tie it at the back. Mei looked into the mirror and a gowned technician stared back at her, one disguise layered upon another.

  The instructor clapped his hands as they walked out. “Excellent. Let’s take a look. You have never seen anything like it.”

  He led them into an elevator, and the doors opened two levels up, onto a walkway high above the factory floor. Mei pressed her back to the rear wall of the elevator as the instructor walked out, oblivious to the height. She saw tiny, white figures through the slats and felt faint.

  “Come on!” He waved to Mei, with Jun by him. “This is your only chance to see the view!”

  Fixing a smile on her face, Mei grasped the handrail on both sides of the walkway and strode toward him, fixing her eyes on his face. She didn’t like looking at him, but it was better than gazing down. As she reached him, trying not to tremble, he gestured expansively at the view.

  “Wow!” Jun cried.

  Mei pulled one arm over and clamped it to the rail on the open side, then dragged her stare from him to the far side of the facility, a few hundred feet away. In the canyon below, at the bottom of her field of vision, white shapes twitched and moved. She kept her focus blurred.

  “There. One billion dollars of investment. The finest factory in all of China—that’s where you will work. Now let’s go and try.”

  “Wonderful,” Mei said, already scurrying to the elevator.

  Even on the ground, the scale of the plant was stunning. Hundreds of workers were packed like worker bees, each with an allocated task. Mei saw eight assembly lines, each several hundred feet long, along which frames were slowly passing, with parts being clipped into place and screws fastened. The hum of the conveyor belt was the only sound. Some workers sat silently on stools and others stood, taking parts from plastic bins with one movement and fixing them with a second. Supervisors watched nearby, in case of errors. It was a giant, human machine.

  “This is assembly. The parts are delivered over there.” The instructor pointed to bays on the far side of the hangar, where forklift trucks were unloading boxes from huge trucks. They were scanned by teams of workers and unpacked into bins, ready to be digested.

  “This is amazing,” Jun said.

  “Isn’t it? Now we’ll go to work.”

  They found a space by the end of the line, where the audio port was clipped on the frame and the structure folded, like metal origami, into its final shape. A team of six was finishing the job—fastening four tiny screws into the frame with miniature electric tools. Mei stood by a girl with bitten fingernails and strands of hair snaking from her cap. She watched as the worker held each frame, fixed her screws, and with two prods of a tool—zzzp, zzzp—sealed one side. Then the boy opposite her fixed the other side.

  They did the same again, and again. It was hypnotic to watch. After an hour of it, Mei’s feet were sore and she was bored, but she couldn’t move. A supervisor watched the other workers while the smiling instructor observed her and Jun. Everyone was locked in position until, at four-thirty, a buzzer sounded. The line stopped, and the girl by Mei put down her tools as chatter replaced the electronic hum.

  The other workers walked off the line, leaving only Mei and Jun standing there with two supervisors and the instructor.

  “One hour until overtime starts. Now we can start welcoming you into Long Tan’s family. Would you like that?”

  “I am eager for the opportunity,” Mei said quickly.

  They stood at the line, trying to fix the screws in place as supervisors passed them tablets. It was far harder than Mei had imagined. The tiny screws slipped in her long fingers, and twice she stabbed herself with the sharp tool.

  “Faster! Faster!” the instructor cried happily. “Now you can respect yourself. Now you learn to work.”

  Fuck eight generations of your ancestors, thought Mei.

  “I love my job,” she said.

  Mei found him on her fourth evening, after the buzzer had signaled t
he end of the overtime shift. She had been moved to the start of the line, where her task was to clip a spring into the frame as it started its journey through many pairs of hands. The sound of the buzzer jolted her, so deep was the trance she’d trained herself to enter.

  Her fingers were raw, but she’d learned to place the screw in the slot silently and efficiently, to avoid getting caught by the spring. She did her task as it had been designed, and the supervisors looked past her, on the hunt for other miscreants. A public apology to Long Tan, written by the woman who’d stood in her place before, was taped nearby. The offender had left, and in a few days, Mei had seen many faces come and go. The turnover was so rapid that she could hardly remember the faces of the departed—it was a shifting, fleeting community.

  Nobody wanted to stay. They’d come there because it was easy to get a job, and it gave them a start in the city. But they all hoped for a better life: model, pop star, fashion designer—their dreams were impossibly big. She’d stopped worrying that somebody who had known Lizzie would recognize her, despite her tinted contact lenses, shorn hair, and makeup. She realized that being identified at Long Tan was as likely as being spotted in the street in Guangzhou.

  Mei limped down the line to where Jun was gathering her things. Her feet and legs did not trouble her as long as she was concentrating on her assembly tasks. But at the end of the shift, they started to complain. She longed to soak her muscles in a hot shower, but anyone who lingered provoked angry shouts from the crowd in the hallway. She sat by Jun on the golf cart to the dormitory, both silent until they’d had their food. They were in a line of buses and electric buggies whipping along the avenue. Mei was resting her eyes on the horizon at the day’s last light when she saw him.

  It was a snapshot from the corner of her eye as he passed, but she knew it was him from his bearing. He sat erect in the front of a golf cart, by the driver, his hand wrapped around the handle of his cane.

  “Stop!” Mei called to the driver.

  “What?” Jun murmured. She was half-asleep, jolting awake only when they hit a bump.

  “See you later.” Mei tripped in her rush to abandon the vehicle as it halted, running across the avenue to another vehicle that was heading back the way they had come. He’d disappeared into the distance and she pressed her foot to the floor, willing the driver to accelerate after him. His cart had passed out of sight beyond a row of trees, but she saw him as they caught up. He’d stepped from the vehicle and was walking into an apartment block.

  The man had vanished again by the time she got inside. She stood in the lobby, listening to a ping-pong game echoing from a recreation room along a hallway. Then she heard the clicking of a cane in the distance. She circled the lobby to isolate the sound and found a corridor leading to a hall. As she ran along it, the door at the end closed behind him, the tip of his cane darting through.

  It was a canteen, but not the kind she was used to, where hundreds of workers crammed around serving stations for meat and vegetables. Even as they ate, they were watched. Last night, an official had stopped Jun as she tipped her remains into a bin and told her to finish her rice. It was poor discipline to leave it because it was plentiful, he warned; Cao had gone hungry when he was a child.

  There were no spies in this restaurant. It was for managers, who were allowed to eat in peace. Mei waited until he’d collected his food and settled at a table alone. Then she took her chance. When she sat opposite, he stared at her in shock as she took out a contact lens to show him one green eye. His jaw fell open, showing a maw of half-chewed food. His face was as delicate as a butterfly, his eyelashes long and fine. He gulped in shock.

  “They said you were dead.” As he spoke, he half-rose in his seat and Mei placed her hand on his to reassure him and hold him in his place. She looked around at the other seats, but nobody had noticed.

  “I’m not dead. I’m here.”

  “Who are you?” He reached across and plucked her badge. “Jiang Jia. This is crazy. This doesn’t make sense. You’re a spirit.” Panicked, he tried to stand again and she grasped his wrist.

  “Listen to me. You wanted to talk after you rescued me. I had to go, but I’m here now. I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Give me your badge.”

  “Will you let me explain?”

  He nodded, and she unclipped the badge and handed it across the table, studying him carefully in case he panicked. As he looked at it, he mouthed the words of her alias and stared at her.

  “I knew it was wrong. I said it was those stupid strips—they couldn’t even get the date right. They said you’d died on the Monday night, but I’d seen you that week. I saved your life.”

  “Liu was your friend, wasn’t she?”

  “She was my dear friend. You’re not her.”

  Mei saw his brain working slowly, piecing together evidence. “I’m a relative of hers. A close relative. I need you to come with me. There’s something very important I have to tell you. If you were Liu’s friend, if you loved her, you must do it in her memory. She would want you to.”

  “I burned money at the temple. I prayed for her.” He talked to himself like an automaton.

  “Thank you. Let’s take a walk.”

  He nodded silently and, walking over to the bin, tipped his remaining food in. Nobody told him off for wasting it, and he was still chewing on his last mouthful in a trance as Mei led him out. She got him onto an electric cart and sat at the back, holding his hand. He gripped it blankly, as if his brain no longer understood but his body was set on cooperating. They stayed on board until the last stop, by the compound gates, where she led him through to the street. It was nine o’clock, and a crowd of workers stood, chatting and smoking.

  The Hui Chun poster was still in the apartment entrance opposite the Internet café, one corner flapping down. She ignored the elevator and climbed the stairs, with the man following her. On the second floor, she knocked on an apartment door, raising her face to a spy hole. An elderly caretaker with a long beard opened the door, nodded at Mei, and led them through to a room.

  Lockhart was there, sitting at a desk by a window with a view of a dingy interior courtyard. The desk was piled up with electronics—a desktop computer, a laptop, and two hard drives—but he was not using them. Instead, he scribbled on a pad of paper. When he noticed them, he walked over to lock the door and then hugged Mei. It was the first time she’d emerged from Long Tan since entering the factory.

  “This is him,” she said in English.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, holding her by the shoulders. She nodded.

  “Great work, Mei. You’re good at this.”

  “Wait,” the man said, rattling the handle of the door. “I should not be here. Let me leave.”

  Lockhart stood in front of him. “You’ll be here a few minutes and then you can go. You’re not in danger.”

  “If they catch me, I am,” the man said. He wrestled with the handle and opened the door, then stopped. Feng stood on the other side, in a dark coat and beret. She stared at him so fiercely that he retreated to the desk, sitting mutely with his eyes on her as she unbuckled her coat.

  “Sorry. Traffic,” she said to Lockhart, pulling another chair from the corner and sitting astride it, her hands resting on the back. She was just two or three feet away from the cowering captive.

  “Name?”

  “I can’t. I can’t—” He stammered the words, glancing piteously at Mei as if she’d betrayed him.

  Feng flourished her identity card. “I work for the Ministry of State Security. I asked your name.”

  “Ma Tung.”

  “Okay, Ma Tung. We’re going to talk, and then you’ll go back across the road and forget about our conversation. You will not mention it to anyone. It never happened. Is that understood?”

  Ma gulped like a fish, wide-eyed.

  “You understand?”

  “I do.”

  “We don’t want to hurt you. I’m grateful to you for saving me. I know you h
elped Tang Liu,” Mei said.

  “We don’t want to, but we will, if you say anything. You will disappear. You will be forgotten.” Feng put on a slow, stupid voice.

  “ ‘What happened to Ma Tung?’ ‘I don’t know. He vanished.’ We can do it easily. We have the power. You know that, don’t you?”

  Ma trembled. “Yes.”

  “We want to know one thing. Then you can go. Okay?”

  Ma nodded, his trance-like state returning, as if he’d seen so many strange things that he’d slipped into a dream.

  “Where did Tang Liu go?”

  “I don’t know. She disappeared.”

  “No,” Feng said with exaggerated patience, as if talking to an idiot. “Before. When you saw Jia, in the crowd near the boy who died. You said she’d ‘made it out.’ Where was she?”

  “She—I don’t—”

  Feng rocked forward on the chair and slapped Ma on the face, leaving a red mark on his cheek. He stroked it in shock.

  “Don’t waste my time. Don’t lie.”

  “The—I—”

  “Where was she? Tell me now.”

  “The ghost shift,” he said.

  Mei saw the glow of the Internet café from beneath the window—the strip-light sodium and the liquid crystal of computer screens. She looked down into the alley’s darkness nervously.

  “We don’t have long,” she said in English.

  “How much time?” Lockhart said.

  “They lock the dormitories at eleven-thirty and the lights go out at midnight. It’s after ten.”

  Ma still sat at the desk, head down, resting on the hard surface. He’d started moaning after answering Feng’s question, as if he had injured himself. Feng ignored him, getting up from the chair and throwing her beret onto the desk by his head. She picked up his cane and examined it, running a painted nail over its glossy surface.

  “This is nice. Malacca, with a sterling silver handle. Monogrammed. How old? Nineteenth century?”